German and Austrian Parents Try to Avoid Immigrant-Enriched Schools for Their Children

The problem: many parents who want to enable their children to have a good start, send them to Volksschulen with a low proportion of foreigners. This is the verdict of a current short study of the "Sachverständigenrats deutscher Stiftungen für Integration und Migration (SVR)."

In Berlin around one third of the immigrant elementary school pupils go to schools in which most of their fellow pupils are of foreign origin, according to the study. Six out of every seven German schoolchildren, by contrast, attend schools with a majority of pupils of German origin. According to the study, this is only partly explained by the fact that more immigrant families live in certain districts than in others. It is also the choice of school by the parents that heightens the social divide. As, although in most German federal states, the school is allocated by the authorities, the parents can set it aside. (continue reading...)